Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 17.djvu/11

RV 9 (THE SAPPHIRE SIREN) "Bows and arrows," I exulted. "Now I feel better! Zarf, we have reason to remain here for a while."

Rapidly I explained, using a pointed stick to make clear my meaning, by drawing in the dirt of the floor. I had been an archery enthusiast on Earth, and knew my subject, even if I had never handled a sword.

Despite my earlier urgency, it was three weeks before we three men set forth from Koto's castle on the edge of the Red Wilderness. Three men, because Koto had protested with lugubrious howls that he wasn't going to be left behind. I'd made him a Baron, he claimed, and it was his right to ride with me when I went forth to war! Zarf chuckled in grim approval, and I, too, endorsed Koto's claim.

We rode the queerest steeds imaginable. Huge birds they were, more like enormous game-cocks than aught else I can compare them to; with longer, thicker spurs and bigger beaks. Ugly-tempered, too. Zarf said they'd fight viciously whenever it came to close quarters. And how those big birds could run!

I asked Koto where he got them, and he replied that he'd gone out one dark night and taken them from a flock kept by a petty lordling some distance away. When I laughed and called him a thief, he said seriously he was no such thing:

"Was not Karan the King in need of them? And did not the kingdom and all that therein was belong to the King?"

So we rode forth, all three mounted and armed with short, thick, powerful bows and thick, heavy arrows. Zarf and I had the swords we had taken from the Vulmins, and Koto bore a ponderous war-club fashioned from a young tree having a natural bulge at the big end. Into this bulge he had driven a dozen bronze spikes all greenish with verdigris—a most efficient and terrible weapon, if he had the courage to use it in hand-to-hand fighting. Zarf maintained that Koto would be so anxious to please me that he'd fight like a maniacal fiend, should the opportunity present.

The crossing of that Red Wilderness was no pleasure jaunt. There were dust storms and blistering heat by day, and an icy wind o' nights that howled like all the devils of Hell let loose. But in time we came to the shore of the Sea of the Dead; and a most fitting name it was for that desolate body of putrescent water.

Dull grayish-greenish water, sullenly heaving and surging to and fro sluggishly and greasily; beaches of dull grayish-brownish sands; and huge dull grayish-blackish boulders and rocks—oh! a most nightmarish picture, taken all in all.

"Zarf," I shuddered, "may it not be possible to ride around this Sea?"

"Perhaps," he returned, dubiously. "But we can cross it in one quarter of the time it would take to ride around."

"But," I queried skeptically, "how shall we cross? I see no boats, nor any way of making any."